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Always losing your car keys?
As Instagram continues to soar in popularity, brands are searching for the ideal way to make the photo sharing platform deliver in the form of sales. This week saw Conrad Hotels trying out a new service which is linked through from Instagram in an effort to drive bookings inspired by wanderlust inducing photography. The limitations of the platform mean that the process is disjointed. Users have to click through from the profile link to be taken to an external site that hosts the same images which are clickable and lead to a booking page. While clunky and complicated, this new technology serves as a nudge to the fast-growing Instagram to develop to a more brand-friendly platform.
Barclays has made it easier for social media fans to send money quickly and easily by launching a new payment service via Twitter. In what it says is a first for British banking, the bank now offers customers the chance to make payments using their Twitter handle via its PingIt service. Customers simply need to log in to their PingIt account, where they can link their Twitter handle, with payment being completed instantly once a contact and amount are confirmed. There are no transaction fees for the payment, with a notification being sent to the recipient via text message.
At some point or another, we’ve all wished for a magical device to help locate misplaced car keys, glasses or wallets. Enter Pixie Points. Here to help locate all those misplaced items, users simply attach a the teardrop shaped Pixie Point onto their gadgets which are then added to a digital map of tagged items trackable on a smartphone via an augmented reality app with Bluetooth. This app which is available for free on IOS and Android is said to allow users to locate these ‘pixified’ objects to within a few inches of their location.
And finally, news is circulating the internet that Apple is introducing long awaited racially diverse emoji with its latest software update. Following widespread criticism that emoji lack diversity, Apple is finally able to add its new diverse offering after changes from an industry standards group, the Unicode Consortium, which determines which emoji will be available to smartphone users. In addition to the new emoji which are rumoured for release in March, the software update will also feature a completely new voice for Siri.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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